Looking Back: An American concept was born when Hull-House was started

Sunday

Dec 8, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Harriett GustasonFor the Journal-Standard

We once more join Jane Addams, this time to see her and her friend and partner. Ellen Gates Starr, go about realizing their enormous dream of “bridging the chasms” of the two worlds of wealth and poverty. Both women were searching for their direction in life.

Jane and Ellen, more highly educated than most women of their day, had witnessed squalor on their trip through Europe and England and had gotten a glimpse there of the efforts being made to alleviate the “shocking slums of London.” They had seen at Toynbee Hall in London how “educated young men had lived, learned and worked in the midst of the slums as publicized by the writer, Charles Dickens.”

“It was from the experience of visiting the shocking slums of London, and seeing what the young men of Toynbee Hall were doing there,” states the book the “History of Stephenson County 1970,” (that) “Miss Addams and Miss Starr learned at last what they could do and how to begin.”

However, these two determined young women did not really have a clue as to the extent of what they were tackling. They, as educated young women for their time, were aware of the awakening in Britain and America to the needs of the destitute and poverty-stricken people, especially the influx of immigrants.

The two women were confused and had no plan, but they plunged in anyway, hoping to see what needed to be done as they proceeded. There was already a “version of Toynbee Hall in New York,” and other individuals around the country were trying to establish such institutions, each in his own way. No two were alike. They were first called “settlement houses” which was later revised to “social settlements.”

The history claims that Addams’ and Starr’s relatives and friends around Stephenson and Winnebago counties in 1889 thought it “crazy” that the “two carefully reared ignorant young women could go to live alone except for a housekeeper in a lawless, multiracial, multilingual slum with only the vaguest theories about what they would do when they got there.”

“In January 1889, the two young women began to search, with the aid of Chicago friends for a home in the crowded west-side slum area of Chicago.” They found a rundown old farmhouse that had been the home of Charles Hull and began to clean it up and “furnish it with their own loved possessions, arranged as if it were a home in Cedarville or Rockford.”

The “1970” history book tells of articles in the Freeport Daily Democrat on July 1 and 3, 1889, before and after a talk given by Jane Addams on July 2, 1889, for the Presbyterian Young People’s Christian Endeavor at First Presbyterian Church in Freeport. She told her “small” audience on a rainy night of her two trips to Europe “and her first painful view of the slums of East London.” From then on her travels changed from the “cultural offerings of the great city” to “observing the homes of the poor and the conditions in which they worked.”

She went on to tell her audience of her plans for Hull-House, and a collection was taken for the youth organization’ missionary fund ...”

The local papers followed everything Jane Addams’ did, we’re told. After all she was John Addams’ daughter. The Freeport Daily Democrat told of Jane’s speaking before the Freeport Shakespeare Society in the O.B. Bidwell home. She told the members about her experience at Toynbee Hall and how she planned to operate Hull-House in the same way. She gave similar speeches in Elgin, Geneva and Rockford.

Hull-House becomes a home

Jane Addams, Ellen Starr and Mary Keyser, their housekeeper, moved into Hull-House on Sept. 18, 1889. Mary Keyser, a friend of Jane’s older sister, is believed to have been a member of the Stephenson County Keyser family. In Jane Addams’ book, “Twenty Years at Hull-House,” Jane praised Mary Keyser for her social work as well as her housekeeping.

The women started out by getting acquainted with their neighbors, inviting them to tea, the history states. There were women of many nationalities and languages, but the three hosts, having been educated in some of the languages, were able to find ways to communicate with the guests who began to filter in.

The first group to come regularly were young women who came once a week to listen to George Eliot’s “Romola” being read aloud. A morning kindergarten was the second project. “That first kindergarten was a constant source of education to us,” Jane Addams wrote. Soon older children came to take part in dramatics and other activities “designed to encourage imagination, initiative and cooperation.”

Other work to do

“The response among what writers on the subject call the intelligentsia of Chicago proved that the Addams-Starr efforts coincided with the similar feelings of many other people,” states the “1970: history book. “Miss Starr’s popularity with the wealthy patrons of the private school where she had been teaching art, and Miss Addams’ appealing eloquence drew an ever-increasing response.”

The history goes into the attitudes of the powerful people of Chicago toward the Addams-Starr Hull-House venture. It tells us they were indifferent toward it. There was much nationwide unrest and suspicion of the foreign elements, we’re told. Much was written about the “unrestricted foreign immigration.” It was believed by some to be “a menace to the American way of life.” Jane Addams’ activities were frequently a focus in the Chicago Tribune.

“Miss Addams’ magnetism drew not only workers, but the needed funds.” It drew children, men and women of diverse backgrounds and needs. The book gives example after example of the cases that were served at Hull-House. One paragraph states: “Guests from the neighborhood, from all walks of life in the city, and visitors from everywhere were from the earliest days invited to dinner in the beautiful dining room, where the food was often the result of old recipes given to them by their immigrant neighbors. Classes in marketing and nutrition resulted in this kind of mutual help.”

A local testimony

“Miss Ruth Hill of Freeport, who became one of the new young professionals in the field of social service and who lived at Hull-House in 1912, says that dinner was the high point of the day. Miss Addams always mixed the salad at the table and after dinner in warm weather the coffee and conversation were transferred to the little terrace outside the dining room, where Miss Addams poured coffee from a lovely service on a tabletop which was made from one of her father’s Cedarville millstones.” Miss Hill called the conversations “eye-opening to a young greenhorn.”

“Miss Addams presided over what others agree was the most exciting, stimulating conversational free-for-all to be found in Chicago, or for that matter, in America, because nowhere else was gathered quite such an extraordinary asssemblage of pioneers who were doing something about so many areas of human relations.”

The concluding paragraph for this portion of the chapter on Jane Addams pinpoints one of her greatest strengths:

“Writers about Miss Addams all say that these people could have been drawn together in no other way, and the residents, particularly, the dominant half-dozen or so who helped shape Hull-House could have been held together by no other person than Jane Addams. Under her influence instead of disagreeing and breaking apart, they disagreed and in friendship sharpened one another’s perceptions and brightened their drives. This ability to act as a catalyst was the basis for Miss Addams’ later successes as chairman in meetings where dissention and failure had been expected, and for her success in arbitrating labor disputes.”

We’ll continue next week with Jane Addams’ story from the “1970” county history book. It is not known by me who wrote this wonderful chapter on her, but it is so beautifully written that it is difficult to leave any of it out. It truly would be valuable for a unit of study in the public schools.

Harriett Gustason is a writer for The Journal-Standard. She can be reached at 815-235-3855 or hg3855@comcast.net.